Middle-earth: Shadow of War is 100 gigabytes, or 130 hobbits worth of floppy disks

Middle-earth: Shadow of War is a pretty big game. In fact, the PC version’s file size is pushing 100GB, although console versions are smaller. But that’s just file size; which would have been meant nothing to Tolkein while he was devising his famous novels.

So in order to figure out how physically large Shadow of War is, we did some Important Maths™. We figured out that the game’s 97.7GB file size would need to be installed on 86416 5.25 inch floppy disks. Those disks are 1.6mm thick, so if you stacked all of them one on top of the other, you’d end up with a pile a little over 138 metres tall.

To put that into perspective, that’s the equivalent of stacking 129 hobbits on top of one another, which is the same as around 34 Treebeards. It’s also just under 10% of the size of The Tower of Sauron, which Peter Jackson and his team reckoned was an impressive 1400m tall.

Maths is hard, and I’m too young to properly remember floppy disks, so if I’ve fudged the numbers here somehow, I’m sorry.